One night, in the sky above a great Italian city, a face appears: a crude, childlike drawing of a face. When the citizens wake up, they look upward in astonishment. Among them is Luca, the young priest entrusted with telling this story. Father Luca is worldly and charismatic: he writes bestselling books, is a regular guest on a TV talk show, and his university lectures are always full. And he is in love with Marta, a troubled and elusive young woman. At first, the oversized face in the sky is met with curiosity and even sympathy. Its photos flood social media feeds. But as the days go by and the Face remains, bewilderment sets in: what does that sign in the sky mean? Could it be a meteorological phenomenon? An artistic happening, a coded message, the signal of an imminent chemical war? Theories and speculations multiply, but the one that grips the masses most powerfully is that it is a mystical event: a prodigy, the manifestation of a god. The first miracles and astonishing healings soon follow. Luca doesn’t know what to tell his parishioners, who yearn to believe and demand that the Church take a stand. The mayor is worried too: the influx of pilgrims and tourists who want to see the Face is unstoppable, with people camping everywhere, and keeping public order is impossible. In the strange metaphysical chaos into which the city has sunk, movements, factions, and sects arise, and new leaders emerge—above all, a young and magnetic transgender ascetic preaching a collective spiritual revolution. Overwhelmed by this wave of fanaticism and tormented by Marta’s sudden disappearance, Luca feels his faith unraveling, yet he begins to glimpse a new way—bare, vertiginous, and unsettling—of opening himself to mystery. Already regarded as one of the most important voices in Italian theater, with his literary debut Sinisi delivers a daring contemporary parable that draws on the great European tradition—Houellebecq, Saramago, Rushdie—while blending it with Italian political news, philosophical narrative, and the supernatural. The result is a bold and powerful novel, defying categorization and confronting us with some of the great questions of our time: what does it mean to believe? Why does humankind continue to hope for something as invisible and incomprehensible as God, as salvation?